And she has already disappointed him so much, the marginal increase really isn't a worry. Medical coma!

zzzzzzz

YIPPEE!!!

Kareen literally jumps in the air with joy. And bangs her head against the ceiling a little bit because she underestimated her jumping ability ANYWAY. 

Okay does, like, everyone else, want a medical coma. Including test subject lady, like, Kareen would be grateful if she instead were to continue self-stirring For Science, but like, continuing to be conscious while inside a maw-mouth would be an incredibly huge ask and Kareen is not in fact asking it. 

Actually with all her nocioception gone she's game to keep going a bit and see what it's like to be all stirred. The pain isn't most of it but it's sort of the hardest to argue oneself out of.

Kareen's Beholding heart is delighted! Would she be willing to send another experience-impression.

Sure. It's like being and also reaching into a vat of peeled grapes and mucus and pâte smears and plasma that are all having an orgy and trying to put the ones that feel like they were cut from the same neighborhood into the same segment of the orgy to see if they'll fuck.

Amazing! Terrible! Much less terrible than last time, though, that's neat.

Yeah!

The next time Kareen sees El, she offers her a handout listing various things which seem likely to improve Arjun's quality of life, ranging from the vision improvements (Sir Alfred wasn't much of a fan but there wasn't anything he particularly wanted to see) to the nocioception annihilation. She's also willing to put him in a medical coma if he wants but she suspects he would prefer to continue being able to talk to El with his nocioceptors annihilated to not being able to talk to El. 

El confirms that he agrees, and holds out her mirror with its connection to him for the purpose. "Now don't take this as license to be terribly annoying now that you don't have to waste all your scarce mental space on being sappy," she tells him. "I can put a blanket over you like you're a bird, see if I don't."

Boop! No more nocioceptors!

"He's really cool," Kareen says once the mirror has been re-pocket dimensioned. "Nobody else has held up as well as him, and I've found names that have been in there for much shorter times."

"Well, probably none of them were flipping off their grandma doing it, I bet that's really helpful."

"Did I ever tell you I turned out to be wrong about my grandma being dead."

"...don't think so."

"My world does not have maw-mouths but it does have various horrible situations you can be trapped in indefinitely and she turned out to have been trapped in one of those. And she was in fact younger when it happened to her than Papa is now, so, you know. Awkward."

"Have been, she's out?"

"Her situation was significantly more tractable than a maw-mouth, yeah, my parents got her out within a couple of days of my alerting them to the situation."

"Hope she holds up all right."

"I hope so too. But she's able to speak in complete sentences even without one of my mirrors helping, so that's promising."

"Thanks for de-nociocepting Arjun."

"You're welcome. I'm really glad I've been able to put most of them in comas."

Nod nod.

Kareen spends much of the next couple of days trying to compose novel divination spells, for use cases such as "find out the names of the people in maw-mouths that nobody ever wrote down where I can find it" and "locate places people wrote down the names of maw-mouth victims that aren't the Journal of Maleficaria Studies." 

And then Saturday happens, and with it, the drag party. 

Gail is thrilled to pieces. How constrained is the wardrobe selection, given that Kareen may not have ever held in her hands a three piece suit that will fit a five foot two high schooler?

Listen. Kareen can make novel things, if she understands how they work! She understands how fabric works! She had never handled a pair of trousers with lace pockets before she started handing them out! Some of these garments are constructed in ways that would make an experienced seamstress go "what the actual fuck," but they look more or less right while someone is wearing them!